Sermon

All Together: A Place at the Table

June 30, 2024
Luke 14:1, 7-14; Hebrews 13:1-2
Speaker:

Everyone needs sanctuary. Many people find their sanctuary in a church, a synagogue, a mosque, or a temple. Still, some have been excluded from communities of faith, breaking them from our faith security, so we often have had to find sanctuary somewhere else.

For many in the LGBTQ community, the first place where they could be safe, the first place where they could connect with their true selves—the first place where they could find sanctuary, was at a bar or a nightclub.

Back in the 50s and 60s, there was nowhere for the LGBT community to go. They were not welcome in restaurants or community centers, and they were certainly not welcome in churches. The only places they could go to be truly themselves were bars, and one of the first nightclubs that opened to the LGBT community was the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York.

The Mafia owned the Stonewall Inn, which was not the most excellent place in Manhattan. It had no running water, liquor license, fire exits, and the toilets were constantly overflowing.

But it was the only gay bar in the city that allowed dancing, and so it catered to a racially diverse assortment of patrons and was popular among the poorest and most marginalized people in the LGBTQ community: drag queens, transgender individuals, lesbians, gay men, male prostitutes, and homeless gay youth.

Police raids on gay bars like Stonewall Inn were routine in the 60s, and they were used to terrorize and humiliate. In 1969, the growing tensions in America around civil rights for women, African Americans, and LGBTQ people increased the frequency of these raids on gay bars by the police and on June 28, the gay community had had enough. The Stonewall Inn was their safe place, refuge, and sanctuary, and they would not let that be taken from them. When the police came to harass them this time, they resisted, and over the next two days, there were riots in the streets of New York. Welcome to Pride!

Our Gospel text for today prompts us to ask how we respond to existential invitations.

Invitation is a fascinating word. It is derived from the verb vito, which means shun or avoid. The prefix in reverses the meaning.

To invite someone is to move beyond shunning or avoiding actively. It is opening to a relationship. Some definitions add the meaning of entering or offering a challenge.

In other words, an invitation provides the challenge of opening up to one another. Regardless of the judgments and avoidances that have kept us from coming together.

Living through the pandemic left us carefully weighing every invitation that came our way, from meeting up with friends to returning to school, church or work. This is especially true as infections rise during the roller coaster ride of re-openings and ongoing pitting of best
practices against personal liberties and political ambitions. This Fourth of July always invites a celebration of national ideals, especially this year. I suspect that many of us feel this offers a particularly poignant invitation to reconsider who we are and God is. It is time to ask again how we wish to grow into the great promise of equality and freedom for all upon which this nation was founded 248 years ago. It is an invitation to face the grievances and injustices coming to the forefront in recent months rather than avoiding them.

In this morning’s scripture, the questions that come to my mind are: for whom is there a place at the table?

To whom is an invitation sent?

More often, these questions sound like:

  • Is there room for me?
  • Will I be invited? If invited, will I count?
  • Will anyone care or notice that I’m there?
  • Will anyone listen to what I have to say?
  • Or recognize and celebrate my gifts?

These questions, most fundamentally, are about belonging — DO I BELONG? DO I MATTER?

It shouldn’t surprise us that Jesus’ answers to these questions up-end social and religious norms.

First, he challenges people’s assumptions about where they belong — don’t sit where you think you should. Humble yourself. Give yourself a lowly spot at the table. Then he admonishes HIS HOST — the leader of the Pharisees — suggesting his guest list is all wrong.

Don’t invite your friends, siblings, relatives, and rich neighbors. Follow God’s guest list. Invite those who belong at God’s table.

Jesus could easily have said: “invite everyone.” But that’s not what he says. That’s never what Jesus says. Jesus is particular — invite the poor. Invite the differently able—the blind, the Deaf. Invite the people with no place in society and no way to repay your hospitality.

Jesus does not say everyone has a place at God’s table — though we know this to be true. Instead, Jesus specifically lists those whom society has marginalized, ostracized, and thrown away.

Who do you think would be on Jesus’s guest list today?

As Pride month winds down, I can’t help but hear Jesus’ voice in the words of — Rachel Held Evans — in an article published posthumously addressing the LGBTQ+ community — a community long marginalized by society and condemned by us — the church.

Held Evans writes:

If you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, gender fluid or queer, I hope you already know you don’t need my affirmation to live whole and joyful lives, just as God made you. You are beloved children of God, and there is nothing I or any other person Christian or church leader can say to alter that. I hope you know, deep in your bones, that there is no height or depth, no angel or demon, no denomination or church or pastor or parent who can separate you from the love of God in Jesus Christ.

My heart grieves over the ways this truth has been obscured and denied by the Church, often in destructive and deadly ways, and I apologize for years of [my] complicity in that. I pray that in the years to come, churches of every denomination will join me in repenting of the ways our communities have marginalized those whom God loves, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. I look to you for leadership moving forward. As long as there is a need for…allies like me to speak up in your support, I will do it, but like many of you, I pray for a day when your humanity alone is enough, when posts like these just are not necessary anymore.

…I pray you have already reached a point in your own story where posts like these are unnecessary to your self-acceptance… Thank you for all you have taught me [– taught us –] about love, courage, faithfulness, and truth. Forgive [us] for all the ways [we] have been complicit in your marginalization. I [personally] am a better wife, mother, Christian, and person for having you in my life.

Rachel Held Evans continues, and I agree: A theology that refuses to accept [your] personhood is deadly.

But I must also acknowledge that the last few years have been deadly to LGBTQ+ individuals and families. According to the ACLU bill tracker, as of June 14, 2024, there were 522 anti-LGBTQ bills in 45 states, mostly attacking Transgender youth and families, especially around life saving gender-affirming care. Cruelty and fear of existence must be the point.

I work for the Human Rights Campaign as the Associate Director of Welcoming Schools. My job’s core is coordinating facilitators from across the US to educate educators on how to have a welcoming classroom and school communities. Doing this work is gratifying, but it is also anxiety-producing due to the nature of many states that have limited or excluded presenting information on how and why we need to support all students, especially LGBTQ youth, transgender youth, and LGBTQ youth of color.

I especially want to honor queer and trans folks of color by turning our attention and energy back to them, to uplift their voices, and to reflect on how I can work in solidarity with this movement and defeat the ongoing harmful legislation.

What does the statement “grow boldly” mean to you? How do you live that out with the HMC community and in life?

How do we extend invitations to all, especially LGBTQ Siblings? Once the invitation is extended, how do you provide an extravagant welcome?

What are ways you help others feel like they belong?

We must continue to ask these questions, especially the LGBTQAI+ community, but honestly, they are for all.

Because I agree with Held Evan about the deadliness of such a theology, but I think that extends much further than the LGBTQ community.

That sort of theology is deadly to all of us.

I believe the cost to us when we take over God’s guest list, when we allow our pride to claim the best seat in the house, when we preclude others at God’s table when we allow homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny or white nationalism to dictate who gets to belong — the cost of this is our very souls.

But there’s another side to that coin. We find our belonging when we humble ourselves and widen the welcome in our words and actions. In Jesus’ words: “You will be repaid when the just are resurrected. We will discover new life, renewed life, and life after death.’

When we allow God’s expansive love to widen our practice of welcome, we may host hospitality to angels without knowing it and we may discover that grace has crept up on us, that it has crept into our church, into our homes, into our lives and into our hearts.

When we extend God’s extravagant welcome to others, we can finally trust that welcome for ourselves. We can finally believe in our own belonging. Not for what we can offer or repay. But our belonging is simply for who we are — God’s beloved children.

May God help us embody the extravagant welcome that might save our souls. May it be so.